City hall on the internet
The German city of Soltau is forging new paths with its portal: it displays for public authorities, citizens, and employees a central platform in which data, applications, services, processes, and knowledge is stored and managed. Via the portal, for example, information can be obtained from authorities, applications can be submitted, assignments can be given to external contractors, and services can be offered to enterprises. Via the internet, this can all be executed at home or in the business. With this, Soltau proves that the image of a dusty old bureaucracy truly belongs in the past.Freiburg, 1 March 2007. In addition to the public page at www.soltau.de, since September 2006 a portal for all people who work with the administration of the city of Soltau has existed at www.stadt-soltau.de. Data and applications for the city can now be called up via a secure personalized login. Users include public employees or authorities, commissioners or municipal officers, concerned petitioners, and businesses. For employees of the city of Soltau, it is an intranet portal with a focus on knowledge management in the office, en route and at home. Lastly, the portal makes it possible to optimize most regularly reccurring required services and thereby to provide a fundamental contribution to administrative modernization.
If, for example, requests were made in writing in the past, processed in the operations department and finally sent as a notification or decision, this process occurs today over the internet: via the personalized login to the portal, the entries will be created electronically and the result will be either immediately or promptly returned; processing will take place automatically by way of pre-defined processes. Using a commercial register as an example, the process will occur as follows: at www.stadt-soltau.de, the user can log in with his or her password. They will then read the information on the corresponding topic and select the desired function. For the commercial register, the user will enter a business and immediately see the result, and they will be automatically charged the corresponding fee.
The portal is connected to existing local databases such as Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, or DB2, from which (for example) the residency register will now be consolidated into a central interface. The data can be processed in the portal, selected via various criteria, and then exported as new files (such as Excel sheets). With the User Manager, after login each user will have exactly the information available to him that he requires and is permitted to access.
The city of Soltau, in the course of their administration modernization, has decided on Intrexx Xtreme for their portal solution. Intrexx Xtreme is a standard software product of the German developing firm, United Planet, designed for portal creation, which makes it possible to handle business processes in multiple sectors free of information loss. Especially of value to authorities and public administrations, the solution has proved to be quick to set up and easy to adjust.
Tasks and various data will now no longer be decentrally, and therefore doubly and triply maintained, rather combined in the portal.
„After only three months with Intrexx Xtreme, we are able to say that we have reached the first important milestones with the new portal. The most important projects are already running productively, and thereby are saving us a good deal of administrative effort,“ says Thomas Körtge, Director of ICT of the city of Soltau.
